Philosophy & Ideas

Hannah Arendt’s Impact on Australia in the Sixties

Peter Gilet

Hannah Arendt was a pre-war Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who became an academic in the USA. She had a certain following among Australian students in the 1960s. She was a philosopher who had studied under Martin Heidegger in Germany, but her impact on Australian students was due as much as anything to the accident of her book on the trial of an important German war criminal being published in 1963. This was Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi fugitive and the former manager of the extermination camp program in Hitler’s Germany. Hannah Arendt had been sent to Jerusalem in 1961 by…